Nescire aude.

October 31, 2005

Did you hear about Arthur Morgenstern, the underwear model–turned–pornstar? You know—the one with the truly prodigious penis. It seems that he had always entertained the possibility of a career change at the back of his mind, but he didn't decide to really go for it until he overheard some folks talking about him, and one of them said, "Art's too long to spend his life in briefs".

October 28, 2005

Unrelated but true update: earlier this week I heard a woman who is apparently Sarah Cahill announce on what is apparently her radio show that there would be a concert of Terry Riley's music today at Mills, and that he would perform an improvisation with Fred Frith. So I went to it, mostly for that reason—I had meant to go to a concert Frith was playing two weeks ago, but the whole wrist thing sort of put a spanner in the works. The concert was good! Riley has a perfect Santa Claus beard, and he seemed very jolly, all told. With one exception—a very Feldman-influenced string quartet—all of the pieces were good (though I don't think the improv came off very well; Riley was playing a prepared piano but his style is completely different from Frith's, who was moreover able to overpower him volume-wise), and one of them, possibly because of the involvement of a choir, strongly resembled Anthony Moore's "Jam Jem Jim Jom Jum" (though the resemblance should probably go the other way, what with Moore's piece having come after Riley's). I saw Aram Shelton, late of Chicago, there as well, playing in the ensemble.

There was a drum solo in one of the pieces, which made me smile.

Also, tons of attractive women at Mills. (But of course being a musician gets you an attractiveness bonus, by me*.) One wonders: how did a women's college, formerly a seminary, set out to acquire the academically extremely odd music department it has?

October 27, 2005

I was talking to a fellow member of my cohort who was raised Catholic in a kind of small-towny environment. The priest was apparently something of a character—he had all sorts of weird affectations in his speech and insisted on making his own communion wafers (presumably this goes against some sort of rule), varying the recipe and procedure according to the process of the liturgical calendar. Occasionally he would let favored parishioners assist him in that last effort, though he was, as you might expect, a bit arbitrary as a taskmaster. He claimed to be able to detect in the finished product even the slightest deviation from the rules he had set down for the making and baking of the wafers. In one case, this student recalled, towards the end of Holy Week he had remonstrated with one of his assistants because he thought he had been blending the flour-water mixture which was to form the substrate for the wafer too rapidly, even though it was the correct speed (this assistant had helped out before) for the indifferent days of the calendar. "You don't understand", the priest had insisted, "for Festival Lenty, you must make paste slowly."

October 26, 2005

First of all, someone needs to write a song by the above title. Second, a joke whose punchline involves "Oaxacan a handsaw"—even though lately the only time my head is really clear is between 11pm and 3am, I'm not up to it at the moment. (This arrangement tends to wreak havoc on my ability to do work, especially since I have a pretty strong mental association between it being after midnight and being time to go to sleep, or at least stop working.) The difficulty lies in the fact that the phrase as written doesn't really make sense. This might be irremediable.

Finally, you know those "tag line" things various personals sites want you (don't pretend you're above it) to attach to your ad, where it will function as the "cover letter" intended to entice the "HR goon" to read the "resume" of your actual ad? Is the most that can be hoped for that they escape bottomless lameness, or does design govern in a thing so small? I'm sort of leaning to the former option.

October 20, 2005

Curtis White has written a novel called America's Magic Mountain, a recasting of Mann's in (you'll never guess) America. The protagonist is still named Hans Castorp. But this is outrageous: no one could possibly be ordinary ("unassuming", as White has it) if he grew up in downstate Illinois with the name "Hans Castorp".

(I received this book, along with Hugh Kenner's Counterfeiters, Harry Mathews' Cigarettes, Ernst Gombrich's A Little History of the World (for some reason) and a few other less immediately interesting books in the mail today, the same day I also got the third issue of n+1. When the hell am I going to read these?—at least the books were kostenlos. Looking about me I see several books checked out of the library, presumably to remind me to check them out again next quarter and continue not reading them. Large portions of my library could be replaced, Time out of Joint–style, with slips of paper saying "book" and it wouldn't make, I suspect, the least difference to me.)

October 17, 2005

Aprently it has been, or will be, featured on Lost, either once or recurrently. Anyone know the story here? It's reportedly undergoing a massive printing at the hands of the Dalkey Archive; it would be a sham if it only showed up once on the show such that by the time it had been printed up, the bloom was off the rose (so to speak).

As my hair was still cut straight at my brows' tops,I'd play about our front door, pulling blossoms.You'd walk by on bamboo stilts, horsing around,You'd walk about my chair, playing with cobalt plums.Two small humans, without animus or suspicion.At 14 I was consort to My Lord You.I would not laugh, as I was bashful.Turning down my mouth [originally: facial apparatus], I'd look at our wall.You'd call on a thousand occasions; I wouldn't look back.

October 16, 2005

(15:19:57) Adam Kotsko:I think that if you were creative enough, you could tailor your vocabulary accordingly.(15:19:58) rumjuggler:you kmow what I mean(15:20:04) rumjuggler:maybe(15:20:21) rumjuggler:feet are sad(15:20:30) rumjuggler:create a new draw!(15:21:09) rumjuggler:drat! Few are the new rats. Fear the new taxes.(15:21:16) Adam Kotsko:Awesome.(15:21:25) Adam Kotsko:This is a blog post begging to be written.(15:21:48) rumjuggler:bread is the very faddish grater

But what's there as a means, that creates a sentence-starter, as S V? Verbs are there, as are names, etc, but where are, eg, "he", "she" as the sayer?---We, as sayers. Negaters, they are absent, but "but". What a hardship! Contiguity is the only way to extend reach to the other side; one wants to start in the same side, though.

October 14, 2005

Life is indeed a vale of tears, my friends: last night, while riding my bike along the ol' riding lane in my characteristic happy-go-lucky, worry-free way, reflecting on a bad joke my father had told me, I was suddenly pitched from my bike, possibly because something (but what?) had gotten in my spokes, possibly because my shoelaces (but how?) had gotten in the gears, resulting in a scraped knee and a right radial head fracture (that's in the elbow) and a probable right scaphoid fracture (wrist). That's, like, my note-taking hand! My knife-wielding hand, and several other kinds of hand, too.

Then, this morning I found out that my car, which I had generously lent to another for the night, had been, through no fault of her own, hit while parked.

Fortunately, I had had the first meeting of a Schopenhauer reading group last night, so I recognize these occurrences as irruptions of a blind , reasonless, and yet somehow malevolent will, and I take corresponding comfort in that—that and the fact that I don't have gout.

Rabbi Nehunia ben Ha-Kanah saw a forked road and grieved that it would branch north and south. Rabbi Akiva saw raw silk and wept at the thought that some would be dyed yellow and some black. Rabbi Ba, in the name of Rav Judah, said, "They were sad because what originally had been the same would now be different.".

October 10, 2005

The previews for Zathura include a scene in which a gallant spaceman observes to the plucky child-heroes of the movie that they have quite an infestation of "orgones". Is a children's movie really the proper venue in which to prosecute some sort of hatchet job against Wilhelm Reich?

October 08, 2005

Here is some advice for yinz. Suppose you have two drives, a master and slave (hey, I didn't invent this terminology), and you boot from the master ("hda"). But the slave ("hdb") is thrice as large, and currently not being used for anything, and you want, out of a misguided sense of the admirability of simplicity, to get rid of hda and replace it with hdb. So you partition it analogously, cp -a everything over fine and dandy, then chroot to what will be the new root of the filesystem and run the installer for your bootloader. Then you swap the drives, restart, fix some permissions, and think you're good to go. Know this! You might still be booting from hda (now named hdb), even though it's not the primary master! You should check to see if this is the case by disconnecting it, before you run shred on it, so that you don't have to go all out of your way to make a boot CD (since you didn't make either a boot CD or a boot disk beforehand, natch).

Here are the morals:

dd is your friend.

Don't just assume that the bootloader installed successfully, saying that if it hadn't, grub-install would not have returned a 0 exit status, but look and see whether or not it has.